TICK-TOCK: DISLOCATION OF TIME IN JOHN FOWLES’S THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN

By Kelly L. Miller

A Thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate Studies Division of

Ohio Dominican University

Columbus, Ohio

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH August 2015 ii

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CONTENTS

CERTIFICATION PAGE …………………………………………………………..ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………………...iv INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1: JOHN FOWLES’S WORKS AND LITERARY CLIMATE ………..4 CHAPTER 2: “I DON’T THINK OF IT AS A HISTORICAL NOVEL”: A CASE FOR A POSTMODERNIST HISTORICAL NOVEL ……………………..12 CHAPTER 3: WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?: QUESTIONING AND DISLOCATING TIME ………………………………………………20 CHAPTER 4: NAÏVE NEEDS: CONCORDANCE AND ENDINGS …………….51 CONCLUSION: TICK-TOCK ……………………………………………………..68 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………71

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to sincerely thank Dr. Juliette Schaefer for her guidance, patience, and suggestions. In addition, thank you for introducing me to Fowles and re-introducing me to Victorian literature. I would also like to thank Dr. Martin Brick for his support, suggestions, and graduate-level study of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Dr. Schaefer and Dr. Brick, each of your courses brought me to realize my interest in the ideas of this thesis.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude for my husband, Brian, and my children, Dayne, Graden, and Nora. Your support is my most treasured blessing. I would also like to thank my family. Your help with the children made this project possible. Finally, thank you to my friend and classmate Sara. I am so grateful we completed this journey, this degree, together.

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INTRODUCTION

Tarbox. How do you deal with the feeling that your reader has expectations of you—that you tell a story, that you end a book, and so on?

Fowles. I hope they’ll follow me in that department. No writer is in control of how people read his books, and this, in some moods, is the delicious thing about the book; because, no matter how precisely and fully you describe something, you never, never know how the reader’s going to read it. --The Art of John Fowles, “Interview with John Fowles” 176

John Fowles revels in the unknown, the ambiguous, and the never, never knowing. In fact, his penchant for the paradoxical is one of his most defining authorial traits. His ambiguous narrative is both a common complaint by critics and a common point of interest. Even before his most popular novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was published in 1969, he amassed an

American, contemporary following with his 1963 novel The Collector and 1965 novel The

Magus. Fowles’s success in Britain trailed because of deprecatory criticism by British critics’ reviews. His popularity with general readers preceded his popularity with scholars. In John

Fowles: A Reference Guide, Barry Olshen and Toni Olshen cite his lagging acceptance in academia as a perceived imbalance in his work. Fowles’s body of work, on one hand, critics perceived as moralizing: “the overly didactic features of nearly everything he writes, fiction and non-fiction alike, has tended on the whole, to detract from his reputation as an artist” (Olshen and Olshen viii). On the other hand, critics voiced consternation that his fiction: “sometimes seems even too suggestive, too inexplicit, especially in regard to his characteristically open or multiple endings” (Olshen and Olshen viii). It seems that Fowles’s works said too much and yet did not say enough, at least not clearly enough. However, The French Lieutenant’s Woman brought acclaim to Fowles, situating him in the graces of both academic and popular readership.

The popularity of his works illustrates that an audience “follows” Fowles. 2

However, Fowles’s work is not always easy to follow because Fowles often denies readers the expectations they have for telling a story and ending a book. The novelistic structure and narrative devices in The French Lieutenant’s Woman challenge readers by using the novel as a means to bring readers to see expectations of novels as restrictive by focusing on various forms of time—a universal entity, and by undermining novelistic conventions. The novel highlights the unstable nature of time, bringing to the forefront temporal flux, instability, and illusion. Fowles crafts a theme around this concept of time by engaging readers’ interaction by problematizing temporal representations in ways that disorient readers and questions what readers “know” about time. The text guides readers in recognizing their disorientation and addressing their confusion.

In order to explore this topic, Chapter 1 examines the qualities of John Fowles’s work and his reception in the literary climate in which he wrote. Fowles’s life works show a dedication to readers’ engagement and heuristic discovery by using Postmodernist techniques that engage in history and show relevance to contemporary readers’ time. Chapter 2 explores a common argument by scholars who try to classify the genre of The French Lieutenant’s Woman as either a historical novel or a contemporary novel. However, the novel is both a nineteenth-century and a twentieth-century novel. The conflation of time, the coexistence of two centuries, is an early identifier to readers that Fowles challenges expectations of time. Chapter 3 illustrates various ways that Fowles dislocates time in the novel. By questioning and subverting expectations of time, Fowles challenges readers to recognize their expectations of novels and their discomfort when he restructures the novel. Chapter 4 highlights one of the most debated elements about the novel, the multiple endings. Though critics recognize three endings, a fourth ending should be considered. By creating a relation between eschatology and fiction, the expectations for endings are shown to be overwhelming machinations conferring tyrannical significance onto the 3 beginning and middle of fiction. By examining the ways in which Fowles undermines expectations of time and challenges traditional novelistic structures, the novel illustrates that disoriented readers engage in a heighted participatory act of reading.

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CHAPTER 1

JOHN FOWLES’S WORKS AND LITERARY CLIMATE

John Fowles’s Works

In Fowles’s first published novel, The Collector (1963), a clerk’s obsession with collecting butterflies becomes an obsession to collect a young and beautiful art student. Critics praised Fowles’s ability to write suspense and narrative in The Collector. To avoid a too rigid classification as “novelist,” Fowles then wrote his collection of philosophical aphorisms in The

Aristos. His next novel published, The Magus, was written before The Aristos in 1950 but underwent revisions and was published in 1965. He revised the text and published it again in

1977. The Magus is a suspense novel that employs heavy symbolism. Fowles’s protagonist,

Nicholas Urfe, teaches on a Greek island where he befriends Conchis who plays suspenseful psychological games on disillusioned Urfe. The Magus became a “cult” novel in America with adolescent fans intent on reading spiritual self-discovery novels (Olshen and Olshen xiii).

Fowles’s first three works began to show a thematic trend towards self-discovery.

Fowles’s next work The French Lieutenant’s Woman aroused debate regarding the genre of the novel. In brief, the nineteenth-century historical setting holds the interest of the

Victorianist; the meta-narration by a twentieth-century narrator holds the interest of the

Postmodernist. Regardless of the genre, this novel represents the point in Fowles’s career when his popularity established him as a literary force with an increase in academic critiques in scholarly journals and doctoral dissertations (Olshen and Olshen xvi). In 1977 Fowles published the novel Daniel Martin, another novel whose protagonist, Daniel Martin, wrestles with a self- reflective crisis. Fowles published Mantissa (1982) next and received negative reviews for tiresome imaginary dialogue between ideas in a protagonist writer’s head and a muse. His last 5 published novel, A Maggot (1985), was another “historical” novel set in England during the

1730s. He also published collections of short stories, a book of poetry, and various nonfiction essays. Fowles claimed: “one thing a modern writer should not be committed to: a style. The next great mega-European writer will write in all styles, as Picasso has painted and Stravinsky composed” (“I Write” 11). Fowles’s reviews are often bifurcated between praise and pejoratives, and he took risks in his writing that did not always enhance his reputation, and yet Fowles’s body of work show a writer’s exploration of style.

Fowles explored styles, but he maintained consistency to a thematic concept throughout his works. While the clerk in Fowles’s The Collector is obsessed with collecting and classifying butterflies, Fowles’s works show resistance against stultifying classifications and literary boundaries: “What to Fowles’s admirers represents philosophical consistency and an insistent moral concern from The Collector through Daniel Martin can appear as redundancy to his detractors” (Olshen and Olshen ix). Katherine Tarbox writes in The Art of John Fowles about his philosophical consistency through six of his works: The Magus, The Collector, The French

Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot. She claims: “All the novels are the same story at bottom . . . . They begin with a protagonist who suffers some degree of narcissism. He (or in the case of The Collector and A Maggot, she) has been living an inauthentic life and playing roles that substitute for true identity” (2). Tarbox continues by explaining that

Fowles’s protagonists learn to see their boundaries and test those boundaries in an effort to attain freedom. It is telling that for each of these six major works, she makes one totalizing statement:

Fowles’s corpus exhibits a predominant theme of coming to see, and through that “seeing” his protagonists are educated on the inauthenticity of their lives (2). Tarbox is not alone in this observation. Susana Onega, in “Self, World, and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles,” argues: 6

“Fowles’s novels and short stories share a single unifying topos: the young hero’s quest for maturation and cosmic integration” (39). Richard P. Lynch, in “Freedoms in The French

Lieutenant’s Woman,” claims the importance of the Existentialist quest for “a road to freedom”

(51). William J. Palmer, in The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of

Selfhood, describes Fowles’s themes as “characters’ quest for authenticity” (3). Fowles’s works illustrate individuals acting on behalf of themselves to achieve authentic selves.

A key inspiration for Fowles’s early works was Existentialism. Terms such as

“individuality” and “authentic self” begin to explain the Existential attitude that critics often use to describe Fowles’s works. Fowles claims that his first three books, including The French

Lieutenant’s Woman, were “more or less disguised existentialist premises” (“Notes” 17).

Scholars often cite Camus and Sartre as Existentialist influences on Fowles’s works.

Existentialism is difficult to define because the theology of Existentialism varies by its practitioners. Walter Kaufmann, in Existentialism: From Dostoevesky to Sartre, explains that in spite of wide disparities, Existentialism often involves a revolt from traditional philosophies (11), in which a key component of the revolt is the importance of individuality. Scholars consider

Existentialism as informing his works, particularly his first three published works, rather than a doctrinal following of Existential principle. To a great degree, his novels bear out a repeated

Existential attitude in which a protagonist experiences disorientation in the face of conformity and in a world that appears meaningless.

While critics often observe that Fowles’s protagonists experience quests for more self- knowledge, critics also often acknowledge Fowles’s interest with his readers’ quests as well. The idea that Fowles requires something more of “the reader” is a common claim among critics such 7 as Lasarenko, Hutcheon, and Palmer. In an interview with Dianne Vipond, Fowles spoke about his obligation to his readers:

I feel very strongly that reading should almost always be a heuristic (that is, a

“teaching by revealing self”) process. I like it that in the Middle Ages, literature

was the domain of the clerics or clerks. Of course that religious parallel can lead

to mere preaching, a boring didacticism, but I cherish the reminder that we writers

have inherited a moral, ethical function. (372)

Many scholars argue that Fowles’s works attempt to teach readers how to read as active participants, as opposed to mindless recipients intent on being told all of the mysteries in the text.

Fowles believes in a certain kind of reading experience in which pleasure derives from creating possibilities from the unexplained (Tarbox 177). His popularity suggests his audience finds pleasure in his works. Neither Tarbox nor Fowles define Fowles’s typical readers with any more specificity than readers who are given an opportunity to become more self-aware about life and reading processes. Fowles’s process of “teaching by revealing” is not reserved for the academic elite. His popularity extends to a very different readership—popular contemporary culture. For instance, adolescents in America saw in Fowles’s The Magus a journey of self-discovery with which they could identify; and, Fowles found success in Hollywood when actress Meryl Streep played Sarah in the movie The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles inspired discourse among academic scholars, but he also showed a rare talent for achieving dual popularity with a general population, that of “the reader.” Fowles’s novels provide opportunities for interpretative activity and heuristic self-discovery. Scholars wrote dissertations on Fowles’s works, and his works topped The New York Times bestseller list, indicating his large and varied readership.

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John Fowles’s Literary Climate

The Student Revolt of May 1968 in France and the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights

Protests in America illustrate the unrest in the Western world during the 1960s. Onega describes the time as a “period of crisis, heralding a complex change of sensibility in the Western world at large. This decade was characterized by widespread demands for engagement and commitment to activism” (30). Fowles, a writer who resists classification, might be satisfied to know that scholars debate his placement in this cultural mutation and the literary movement. Though he is most often considered a Postmodernist writer, scholars also see him as a “key writer, linking modernism and postmodernism in Britain, and he is indeed a writer placed generationally after

Beckett, Borges, and Durrell” (Onega 36). The world was changing, the literary climate was changing, and Fowles was on the precipice between two literary movements: Modernism and

Postmodernism.

Onega suggests that to situate Fowles’s contribution to the British canon, it is important to understand the events during the 1960s, the time he published his first four works: The Aristos,

The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Critic Tamás Bényei, in Acts of

Attention: Figure and Narrative in Postwar British Novels, places Fowles’s The French

Lieutenant’s Woman among novels of “quality and vigour of postwar fiction” including: Evelyn

Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945); William Golding’s trilogy Rites of Passage (1980), Close

Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989); and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987); and Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (1990). Bènyei also cites The French Lieutenant’s Woman as one of very few English novels to be considered a Postmodernist text (66). British literature of the time period adhered to a “stubbornly realistic, parochial British fiction” (66). Fowles’s novel 9 distorted reality and disallowed religious platitudes, earning him a position on a short list of

Postmodern, British writers.

Most scholars place Fowles beyond the Modernist movement and consider Fowles’s works to be Postmodernist. Scholars debate the elements of Postmodernism, suggesting the possible defining factors: general definition, time period after 1945, time period after 1968, time period after 1970, time period after 1980, literary association with capitalism (Hutcheon, Poetics

3-4). Bényei suggests that critic Linda Hutcheon, author of A Poetics of Post Modernism:

History, Theory, Fiction and Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafiction Paradox, influenced

Postmodernism in the 1980s (66). During the 1980s, Hutcheon argued that Postmodernism is not synonymous with “contemporary”; rather, a factor of Postmodernism includes a re-examination of historical context (Bényei 66-67; Hutcheon, Poetics 4). Hutcheon describes Postmodernism in the context of Fowles’s works as an example of Postmodern historiographic metafiction:

It is usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of

discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminancy, and

antitotalization. What all of these words literally do (precisely by their disavowing

prefixes—dis, de, in, anti) is incorporate that which they aim to contest—as does,

I suppose, the term postmodernism itself . . . . I would like to begin by arguing

that, for me, postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and

abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges. (Poetics 3)

Using this definition, Hutcheon includes Ezra Pound and Jorge Luis Borges as Fowles’s postmodernist contemporaries.

Some scholars include the French nouveau roman movement as part of Postmodernism.

Fowles, though a self-proclaimed Francophile, expressed derision for the nouveau roman, a 10 literary movement in the 1950s that focused on writing new novels diverging from classical literary genres. Frank Kermode, whose 1965 Bryn Mawr College lectures are compiled in The

Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, describes the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a nouveau roman writer:

And so we have a novel [La Jalouste] in which the reader will find none of the

gratification to be had from sham temporality, sham causality, falsely certain

description, clear story. The new novel “repeats itself, bisects itself, modifies

itself, contradicts itself, without even accumulating enough bulk to constitute a

past—and thus a ‘story,’ in the traditional sense of the word.” The reader is not

offered easy satisfactions, but a challenge to creative co-operation. (19)

Writers associated with the nouveau roman movement wrote with an extreme indifference to paradigmatic expectations of novels, and they undermined those expectations to foster aesthetic engagement by readers. Kermode appreciates that Robbe-Grillet’s writing illustrates suspicion for conventional paradigms of novels such as “sham temporality,” but Kermode emphasizes that if Robbe-Grillet achieved a complete disavowal for all conventional aspects of the novel, a complete schism from traditional, novelistic expectations, then the discourse no longer acts like a novel. Instead, Kermode claims that Robbe-Grillet defeats himself by deconstructing the novel into an anti-novel. Kermode counters this idea with a rhetorical: “How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world?” (143). Fowles’s interest in experimentation with style and genre seems to align with the ideas held by the nouveau roman movement; however, Fowles, similar to Kermode, questioned this movement. For example, Fowles’s narrator references Robbe-Grillet’s essay, “Pour un Nouveau Roman’ (1963), in The French 11

Lieutenant’s Woman citing its experimental nature; and in his “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”

Fowles charges Robbe-Grillet’s concept that novels must always create new forms a “fallacy”:

It reduces the purpose of the novel to the discovery of new forms, whereas its

other purposes—to entertain, to satirize, to describe new sensibilities, to record

life, to improve life, and so on—are clearly just as viable and important. But his

obsessive pleading for new form places a kind of stress on every passage one

writes today. (16)

Although Fowles valued writing in new styles, and his works are often innovative, he rejects experimental writing: “Some academics still set such great store in experimental [avant-garde] writing. I should have thought the interest now is how you can restructure traditional modes”

(qtd. in Tarbox 179). Fowles’s interest in restructuring aligns well to Hutcheon’s definition of

Postmodernism. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, Fowles, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, restructures the traditional modes used in the Victorian novel establishing a paradox because he both installs and then subverts those modes.

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CHAPTER 2

“I DON’T THINK OF IT AS A HISTORICAL NOVEL”:

A CASE FOR A POSTMODERNIST HISTORICAL NOVEL

It seems undeniable that The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a historical fiction novel.

Yet, this genre classification is contested. In a sense, Fowles himself started this debate before he even published the novel. In his essay, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” he reflects on writing

The French Lieutenant’s Woman: “The novel I am writing at the moment (provisionally entitled

The French Lieutenant’s Woman) is set about a hundred years back. I don’t think of it as a historical novel, a genre in which I have very little interest” (13). Aware of the intentional fallacy, Fowles’s denial must cause pause. How can he deny that a novel set during the Victorian age, written in the twentieth century is not a historical novel? By definition, he wrote a historical novel. The English critics, though slow to praise Fowles’s works, accepted this novel as praiseworthy because they perceived its commitment to Victorianism (Bènyei 67).

The novel is historical. It is Victorian. It employs literary techniques of the Victorian period. The novel provides an image of the Victorian world. Sarah, a governess from Dorset, disengages herself from the strict social and moral dictates of the nineteenth century. Charles, an

English gentleman, plans to marry the daughter of a retail tradesman of considerable wealth, thus exhibiting the tension of the social classes and the economic system. Servants Sam and Mary further the economic reality regarding an emerging middle class. The book shows the elephantine fragment of rock, The Cobb; the seaside town Lyme Regis; a gentleman’s ancestral hall, Winsyatt; pastoral Undercliff; and London. The novel references and employs techniques used by Victorian period writers, for example each chapter begins with an epigraph. The epigraphs themselves are often excerpts from Victorian writers such as Tennyson, Austen, 13

Hardy, Marx, and Arnold. Fowles uses the omniscient narrator, so prevalent in the Victorian works, as Bènyei describes:

One could hardly imagine a more traditional opening sentence; it is, in fact, a

version of the “two men were walking on the road” type of beginning, hidden in a

convoluted and over-rhetoricized sentence. Its Victorianism does not merely

consist in the way it obligingly marks out the novelistic space and time right at the

start, but also in the rhetorical means it employs to create the protocols of

intimacy between narrator and reader, so typical of Victorian fiction . . . . he

possesses that most envied faculty of Victorian narrators, knowledge about the

referential world of the text. The ability to rank the winds implies that he has

indeed been there. (italics in orig. 70)

Well-known Victorian novelist George Eliot implies that her narratorial “I” in Adam Bede knew the referential worlds Broxton and Hayslope and spoke to Adam Bede. In this manner, Eliot establishes an omniscient narrator who has “been there”; Fowles employs a typical Victorian narrative technique.

The Victorian elements are clear. Walter Allen in “The Achievement of John Fowles” declares that the novel is “first and foremost, an historical novel” (qtd. in Johnson 287). Robert

Huffaker, author of John Fowles, also argues for the historical nature of the novel:

The novel’s panorama of Victorian England bears close-ups of such specialized

activities as London whoring and legal negotiating. The book documents

discussions of Victorian science, politics, economics, and social custom, and it

describes both urban and pastoral England. Such illumination is expected of an

historical novel, and this one provides it. (98) 14

Though Huffaker argues that Fowles wrote a historical novel, he goes on to state that the novel is more than its Victorian components: “At its elementary level, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a magnificent historical novel” (98). Fowles is not an author often described as elementary— obscure and frustrating perhaps, but not elementary. Huffaker suggests that the “elementary”

Victorian elements are not the predominant elements in the novel. Critics that claims that the novel is primarily committed to representing the Victorian culture, thus disregard major literary techniques at work in the novel that were not hallmarks of the Victorian writers. As such, to consider The French Lieutenant’s Woman as primarily a historical novel falls short of an adequate classification for the setting of this book in the Victorian period.

In opposition to the critics who view The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a Victorian novel, scholars propose Fowles’s narrator derides the Victorian society. Parody in this application assumes that Fowles’s narrator suggests a simple proposal: the twentieth century is superior to the nineteenth century. Fowles’s narrator mocks the fashions worn by Victorians when he explains that the Victorian women rejected bloomer trouser suits. He says: “They were offered sense; and chose a six-foot folly unparalleled in the most folly-ridden of minor arts”

(209). He also rebukes the religious zealot, Mrs. Poulteney, who takes a perverse pleasure in

“Christian” judgement of others. Fowles parodies other Victorian conventions, but he also offsets the more derisory elements. For instance, he provides a foil to Mrs. Poulteney in Aunt

Tranter, who is like Mrs. Poulteney in social stature, but kind, giving, and nonjudgmental. In addition, Fowles’s narrator questions both the Victorian society and contemporary readers, such as in Chapter 13: “A character is either ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur,

I can only smile” (82). Thus, Fowles highlights and questions aspects of both the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Although an interpretation that considers Fowles writing a 15 traditional parody of the Victorian period is a valid interpretation, as it acknowledges the text as a pretense, it too misses something. To interpret the novel as a conventional parody still puts too much emphasis on the specific time period in the novel; it is still too historical.

Parody of the convention of the Victorian novel exists in the text; however, the parody in the novel is atypical (Hutcheon, Poetics 34). Hutcheon also suggests that a parody that identifies the twentieth century as superior to the nineteenth century is too simplistic (Narcissistic 60).

Hutcheon defines the parody of Postmodern historiographic metafiction as a parody of deference as in “loving, if ironic refunctioning” (Poetics 34). She identifies The French Lieutenant’s

Woman as the type of Postmodernism that employs deferential parody: “to parody is not to destroy the past; in fact to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it” (Poetics 126).

“Enshrine” connotes a positive relationship between the text and its parody. Fowles uses parody, but the unique kind proposed by Hutcheon.

In the novel, Fowles parodies the omniscient narrator reminiscent of George Eliot’s style.

But, Fowles’s novel is unique, not Victorian. Unlike Eliot’s narrator, Fowles’s narrator introduces a distinct historical element to the novel. While the narrator in Eliot’s Adam Bede interjects in the novel from an implied, marginally later date in history, Fowles’s narrator interjects from a vantage point of approximately one hundred years later. Unlike Eliot’s narrator,

Fowles’s narrator is bifurcated because he has a dual existence as both a Victorian narrator and a

Modern narrator, who is narrating differently than Eliot’s narrator. Although aspects of the narrator are conventional, this narrator receives much attention from scholars. In general, throughout Fowles’s works, his narrative techniques violate narration; narrative; and the relationships among author, narrator, characters, and readers. Fowles’s narrative explorations rouse critics to create a multitude of literary theories on narratology. William Nelles, in 16

“Problems for Narrative Theory: The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” acknowledges the problems

Fowles’s novel poses to numerous critics who wish to describe and to analyze the narratorial techniques Fowles’s employs (207-08). Though many aspects of the novel’s narratology are worth studying, they are outside the scope of this paper.

Mahmoud Salami’s text, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, considers Fowles’s inventive discourse with a Victorian omniscient narrator of major importance in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Noting the complexity of Fowles’s narrative technique, he considers Fowles as a Postmodernist writer who transgresses the rules of narratorial and narrative technique (13). Salami, as does Hutcheon, calls attention to the novel’s self-reflexive narrator that has historical nineteenth-century and twentieth-century existence. Likewise, in

“The Two Endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” Charles Scruggs also considers the historical influence on the narrator: “he has adopted the voice of the omniscient narrator, because he is writing a novel set in Victorian England, that voice has necessarily been altered by the revisionist perspective of the modern criticism, as well as by the implications of the explored, centrifugal universe of the modern world” (96). Salami observes about the narrator: “the problematic confrontation of history with the novel’s self-reflexive narrative . . . . deliberately challenges the cultural and social assumption of the traditional theory of narrative” (105).

Fowles’s narrator and narrative show a distinct Postmodernist interest in the traditional narratorial conventions and in making those conventions new for the twentieth-century novel.

Hutcheon’s concept of Postmodernism aligns to Fowles’s determination that modern works revisit, but make new, traditional modes. The novel might be the answer to Robbe-

Grillet’s pleading for a new form. This is Fowles’s compromise—his attempt to “restructure traditional modes” (Tarbox 179). Hutcheon suggests exactly that: 17

Historically, Fowles has no choice; he writes after the nouveau roman. While

retaining all the morals and social concerns of James and the English novel

tradition, he knows that a new, equally “vital” form must emerge from its

antiquated conventions. If he self-consciously imitates George Eliot, it is as a way

to Roland Barthes. (Narcissistic 59)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman illustrates inventive restructuring of the traditional modes of the Victorian literary period. Tibor Tόth, in “Ambiguity in The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” argues there is no reason to attempt to establish pre-eminence of either the nineteenth century or the twentieth century (77). Rather, it is the existence of both centuries in coordination, or at times in opposition, that is inventive. Robert Scholes makes a similar argument in Fabulation and

Metafiction: the meaning-making of the text comes from the Victorian period and the twentieth century conflated in time (28). As illustrated, numerous scholars point to the importance of the historical nineteenth century coexistent with the twentieth century. Fowles’ choice of the

Victorian time period highlights the importance of time in interpreting The French Lieutenant’s

Woman. The Victorians existed in a state of great upheaval regarding concepts of time and humans’ relations to time. Although an adolescent character such as Ernestina Freeman did not understand the great changes of the times, Charles understands the sense of crisis the Victorians experienced. Lyell and Darwin, as presented in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, changed the

Victorian’s concept of time, and left the Victorians disoriented and confused.

Additionally, Fowles viewed the Victorian period as a time ripe for Existential awareness. In Fowles’s “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” he describes Charles as an

Existentialist before the term “existentialist” existed (17). He articulates that the Existentialism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman relates to the Victorian period because he views the period as 18 highly Existentialist in its changing structures: “By the 1860s the great iron structures of their philosophies, religions, and social stratifications were already beginning to look dangerously corroded to the more perspicacious” (“Notes” 16). To look upon traditional systems with a discerning eye is a part of Existentialism in Fowles’s novel. Kermode also shows how Fowles’s interest in time is inherent in Existentialism: “Existentialist man, who has total responsibility for his actions, has no relevant past . . . . in the world ‘all is act’” (137). If Charles is to evolve in the novel from a Victorian gentleman to an Existentialist, then he must continue to act. It is not enough that Charles makes love to Sarah; he must then act again with an Existentialist purpose.

He must end his engagement with Ernestina. He must sign Mr. Freeman’s document that revokes his status as a gentleman. One act does not become a “past” in which Charles can rest on

Existential laurels, as if he completed his evolution. Charles must continue to take responsibility for his actions in a way that is self-aware and de-petrifies him from the fossilized existence he found himself at the beginning of the novel. Existentialism denies a past, allowing only for the present. The Existentialism Fowles saw in the Victorian predicament brought upon the age by

Darwin, Lyell, and other crumbling structures, also points to how Fowles highlights temporal concepts.

Fowles denies interest in writing a historical novel, and his novel should not be considered as such. In a memorandum to himself, Fowles wrote: “Remember the etymology of the word. A novel is something new. It must have relevance to the writer’s now—so don’t you ever pretend you live in 1867; or make sure the reader knows it’s a pretense” (“Notes” 15). His commitment is not to history; rather, his novel shows a Postmodernist treatment of history and a preoccupation with time and humans’ importance in relation to time. Though Fowles may not have considered himself a Postmodernist, The French Lieutenant’s Woman shows the 19

Postmodernist trait of highlighting historicity to write something new. Hutcheon’s focus on the historical aspect of Fowles’s novel suggests that the coexistence of the two centuries that then highlight the restructuring of nineteenth-century techniques and twentieth-century expectations, are both vital to interpreting his novel. Fowles needed to subvert and dismantle boundaries, and the Victorians were prolific in their restrictions—duty, religion, sex, social status, evolution, novelistic structure. The Victorian period offered plenty of restrictions to Fowles who was looking to break some rules.

20

CHAPTER 3

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?: QUESTIONING AND DISLOCATING TIME

The great nightmare of the respectable Victorian mind was the only too real one created by the geologist Lyell and the biologist Darwin. Until then man had lived like a child in a small room. They gave him—and never was a present less welcome—infinite space and time, and a hideously mechanistic explanation of human reality into the bargain. --John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel” Wormholes 17

Critics often study The French Lieutenant’s Woman for its Victorian nature, its narratorial intrusion by the twentieth-century narrator on the nineteenth century, its infamous

Chapter 13, and its multiple endings. Each of these often-studied elements relate in some way to time—a time period, jarring time, end of novelistic time. Fowles’s essay on The French

Lieutenant’s Woman also mentions Lyell’s and Darwin’s effects on the Victorians’ concept of time and how Lyell and Darwin’s discoveries forced the age to make sense of their place in time.

Fowles’s narrator implies that Lyell’s Principles of Geology questioned Genesis, and the

Victorians felt threatened: “at the time of which I write few had even heard of Lyell’s masterwork, fewer believed its theories, and fewer still accepted all their implications. Genesis is a great lie; but it is also a great poem; and a six-thousand-year-old womb is much warmer than one that stretches for two thousand million” (130-31). The implication is that part of the fear of accepting Lyell’s theories relates to the change of place in time. Kermode points to the importance of time as a human need: “whether you think time will have a stop or that the world is eternal; there is still a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance in relation to it—a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end” (4). Kermode’s lectures are based on “making sense of the ways we make sense of the world” (31). In essence,

Lyell and Darwin “moved” the beginning of time, and the Victorians staggered to situate themselves in “time.” Fowles’s novel is preoccupied with writing a fiction about time. 21

Humans construct the concept of time. Calendars, clocks, Genesis, Apocalypse, and novelistic time are human devices that appear to organize time. Kermode argues that in these ways, humans proclaim meaning about time, and this meaning is only a construct (11). Kermode argues that humans use these fictive constraints to “make sense of their span” of life (7). As such, humans create a temporally ordered world from a world that is arbitrary. In The French

Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles highlights the unstable nature of time, a state of temporal flux and instability. However, Fowles not only crafts a theme around the concept of time, he also engages the reader’s interaction in the novel by problematizing temporal representation in ways that disorient readers. The novel forces readers to recognize their confusion and to make attempts to address it. By examining the way Fowles undermines the stability of time in The French

Lieutenant’s Woman, the text disorients the readers thereby engaging readers in a heightened participatory act of reading.

Conflating and Confusing Time

Recognizing the narrator’s time of narrating is important to understanding Fowles’s unique narration. As argued in Chapter 2, Fowles’s narrator conflates the time of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Huffaker focuses on the narrator’s temporal existence by discussing what he refers to as the narrator’s “time-linking,” which is an act that links the

Victorian time to the twentieth century through the narrator, who exists in both times at the same time, or synchronistically. The narrator maintains his twentieth-century persona while disguising himself to take “trips into the book.” Huffaker’s argument denies that Fowles separates the time periods; rather Fowles establishes the “perpetuity of existence” (99). The narrator exists simultaneously; thus, Fowles “destroy[s] the separateness of the two ages” (99). Though 22

Victorian past and the narrator’s present seems to be two different times, the narrator speaks about time as parallel, both happening at the same time, and in doing so he disarms readers who expect to read a novel set in England in 1867, not read the simultaneous existence of 1867 and

1967. One instance in which readers are confused by the narrator’s representation of time is when the narrator describes the Toby jug that Sarah purchased while staying in the Endicott

Family Hotel. The narrator says the cracked Toby was re-cracked; and, that he can testify to this because he had “bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal more than the three pennies

Sarah was charged. But unlike her, I fell for the Ralph Wood part of it. She fell for the smile”

(220). The time of this passage is problematic. It is impossible for the narrator to know that

Sarah paid three pennies for the jug and that its smile attracted her, while at the same time, years later, he bought the same jug. Readers are unable to situate the narrator in a traditional manner of either past or present; rather, readers must accept that the narrator exists simultaneously in both the past and the present.

The narrator again exhibits problematic time-linking when presenting the trial of

Lieutenant Emile de La Roncière. Dr. Grogan hands Charles a book that describes the trial and other observations of psychology by a Dr. Karl Matthei. A jury found La Roncière guilty of attacking and harassing a woman named Marie de Morell. However, the narrator complicates time with a footnote about the verdict of the trial. The narrator adds to the 1835 account. The case was reopened in 1848 and La Roncière was exonerated. But the narrator continues in the footnote by providing another addition to the case updated in 1968:

But his story has an extraordinary final twist. Only quite recently has it become

known that he at least partly deserved the hysterical Mlle de Morell’s revenge on

him. He had indeed entered her bedroom on that September night of 1834; but not 23

through the window. Having earlier seduced the governess Miss Allen (perfide

Albion!), he made a much simpler entry from her adjoining bedroom. The purpose

of his visit was not amatory, but in fulfillment of a bet he had made with some

brother officers, to whom he had boasted of having slept with Marie. He was

challenged to produce proof in the form of a lock of hair—but not from the girl’s

head. The wound in Marie’s thigh was caused by a pair of scissors; . . . . An

excellent discussion of this bizarre case may be found in Renè Floriot, Les

Erreaurs Judiciaires, Paris, 1968. (187-88)

The narrator, who witnesses Dr. Grogan handing the book to Charles in 1867, is also aware of the 1968 book, one hundred and one years past the year Charles first reads La Roncière’s account. The narrator’s synchronistic existence, existing in both the past and the present at the same time, complicates readers’ understandings of the existence and time of the narrator.

Joanne V. Creighton in “The Reader and Modern and Post-Modern Fiction” explains about Fowles’s effect of the narrator on the reader:

The reader may be jarred from total passivity, however, by the contemporary

perspective of the narrator. Looking back one hundred years, the narrator is eager

both to display his extensive research into the Victorian period and to make

connections to ours. His allusions to the computer, television, radar, the Gestapo,

and other trappings of the twentieth century may create some tension and keep the

reader from uncritically settling into the Victorian illusion of the novel. (220)

Creighton points to the jarring effect that the conflation of time creates for readers. Another example of this disorientation for readers is when the narrator describes Charles early in the novel: 24

Though Charles liked to think of himself as a scientific young man and would

probably not have been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of

the airplane, the jet engine, television, radar: what would have astounded him was

the changed attitude to time itself. The supposed great misery of our century is the

lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly

not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and

income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things—as if the final aim

of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect

lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his contemporaries and social

peers, the time signature over existence was firmly adagio. The problem was not

fitting in all that one wanted to do, but spinning out what one did to occupy the

vast colonnades of leisure available. (italics in orig. 16)

The tension exists because the narrator exists in both worlds; it exists, as in the quote, because the narrator includes and draws in readers with “our century,” “we devote,” and “our societies.”

The reader recognizes that the conflation of the Victorian time is impossible, and this acknowledgment of coexistence breaks the expectations of realism. A. J. B. Johnson, in “Realism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” refers to the narrator’s impossible nature in both the past and the present as it harkens certain readers’ responses that declare the essence of: “‘This,’ I feel,

‘is going too far’” (293). Readers expect certain boundaries, and because Fowles’s novel relies heavily upon the Victorian setting, the inclusion of the modern disorients because it fails to uphold temporal and realistic boundaries.

25

History’s Time and Characters: Blurring Reality

Ernestina and Charles stroll along The Cobb in the opening scene of the novel. Ernestina says to Charles: “These are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in

Persuasion” (13). Ernestina’s reference to Jane Austen is Fowles’s early and subtle experimentation with ontology, a shared history between characters and readers. Ernestina is a character in a novel that references another character in a novel. Ernestina and Charles have read

Persuasion. Jane Austen existed; Jane Austen’s character Louisa Musgrove was made to fall down stairs, and Fowles’s character’s reference to the Austen novel constitutes an intertextual reference that attempts to make Ernestina and Charles seem more real. On the other hand, their act of remembering a novel and Austen’s control of characters, reminds readers that they are also reading a novel. Though readers can get lost in the moment, ultimately Fowles “makes” his characters remember Austen. Thomas Docherty in “A Constant Reality: The Presentation of

Character in the Fiction of John Fowles,” describes this as a device he coins “real-ize” (133).

Fowles fills the text with names of real artists, well-known people, and places. To make reference to real historical entities seems to make the text more real. However, Docherty astutely argues that the references to the historical entities point to a relationship between history’s real time and the characters, thereby blurring the relationship between the characters and history:

the name, be it that of an artist (Bonnard, say) or simply that of a well-known

person (Kenneth Tynan) has its primary sense in the world of History, and a

certain amount of “cultural competence” is necessary to our comprehension of its

place in the novel. Even if that is lacking, and all that we know is that Lukács or

Marx or Darwin lived, or that Oxford and The Randolph Hotel exist (for 26

geographical names are important too), then still the use of these names serves to

blur the distinction between written fictional text and real history (real people

exist in our text—history) . . . . then the illusion we are given is that they [fictional

character and a real entity] are of the same ontological status; if Sarah lives at

Rossetti’s house, she must have the same ontological/historical reality as he does

in our minds. (133)

Fowles’s references to Victorian entities by the characters or narrator serves to blur the distinction between the characters and the historical time, allowing the characters to share a place in real historical time with the real historical referents.

Later in the novel, Fowles’s narrator implies that the character Mary is “real” by projecting a future for Mary, and that future exists in the same time as the narrator writing one hundred years later:

I brought up Ronsard’s name just now; and her figure required a word from his

vocabulary, one for which we have no equivalent in English: rondelet—all that is

seductive in plumpness without losing all that is nice in slimness. Mary’s great-

great-granddaughter, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, much

resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one

of the more celebrated younger English film actresses. (64-65)

The narrator leads readers to pause and wonder, for instance: “Which actress? Maybe Audrey

Hepburn? Or Vanessa Redgrave? Meryl Streep—no she isn’t British.” Johnson recognizes that the narrator’s ploy worked for the “briefest instant” before she realizes the passage is a ploy of realism reaching its ultimate success because Mary is not real; therefore, no relative of hers 27 exists (293). Moments like this are when the novel appears to be utterly most real, as well as when its falsity is also most obvious. As Johnson explains:

But it [realism] cannot be sustained, and susceptibility is almost immediately

overwhelmed by a combination of reason and the fixed patterns of belief about

fiction. The result of this total but fleeting substantiation of the illusion is its utter

rout. The closer it comes to succeeding, the more derisory is the immediately

subsequent reaction. Fowles here pushes the technique of realism so far . . . .

(293)

But, what is it that is “so far?” Dwight Eddins, in “John Fowles: Existence as Authorship,” articulates the effects of realistic techniques pushed to these limits:

The paradox presented by embodying these anti-novelistic views in a novel

symbolize, yet again, the tension that must exist between the necessary fictions of

eidetic images and the urge to truthfulness about contingent reality. Art must

continually undermine its own artifice if it is to maintain its dialectic with the

reality that provides its elements. If it pretends to ontological autonomy, it

becomes the enemy of its own vitality and authenticity. (212)

When Sarah reads Walter Scott (48), when Ernestina feels purified by reading a poem eulogy for

Florence Nightingale, and when Dr. Grogan swears on the pseudo “Bible” of Darwin’s The

Origin of Species (177) the text pretends that the characters and narrator also exist in the same time, or share the same ontology, as the historical referents.

28

Making Sense of Time: History

In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles reveals the mistaken trust in the objectivity of history as he shows that representations of history are subjective and suspect. Hutcheon supports this reading, proposing that within Postmodern writings, there exists a style of historiographic metafiction. She defines this writing as: “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (italics in orig., Poetics 5).

Fowles’s novel can be considered historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon, Poetics 5) because the novel highlights the problems of knowing the past and making sense of the past. History, the way to make sense of past time, is being rethought according to Hutcheon’s concept of

Postmodernism, in which history can only be known by textuality: “We cannot know the past except through its texts: its documents, its evidence, even its eye-witness accounts are texts.

Even the institutions of the past, its social structures and practices, could be seen, in one sense, as social texts” (Poetics 16). Fowles’s novel exhibits how the society and texts of the past project inaccuracies.

Fowles’s novel exhibits how a great lie distorts history:

The vast majority of witnesses and reporters, in every age, belong to the educated

class; and this has produced, throughout history, a kind of minority distortion of

reality. The prudish puritanity we lend to the Victorians, and rather lazily apply to

all classes of Victorian society, is in fact a middle-class view of the middle-class

ethos. (214)

Fowles’s narrator implies that the representation of history, by any historical age, is less an objective science and more of a subjective interpretation dependent on ethos, or morals. In a 29 typical Postmodernist fashion, Fowles foregrounds the “prudish puritanity” by the middle-class

Victorian society by using the Victorian historical discourse, and then he subverts that discourse by writing a novel even more Victorian than the Victorians could have written—at least that is

Fowles’s claim regarding this novel. In a memorandum to himself he wrote: “You are not trying to write something one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write; but perhaps something one of them failed to write” (“Notes” 15). Fowles produces a text that only someone outside the time period could write. Fowles’s inclusion of sexually charged scenes, such as those in The French

Lieutenant’s Woman between Sam and Mary, and Charles and Sarah suggest a subversion of time as Bènyei points out:

The explicit sexual scenes and the essayistic passages on Victorian sexuality

implicitly point to the time-gap on the level of novelistic discourse. From a

narrative position that no longer knows forbidden areas, the narrator is free to

decide at his discretion what he will or will not speak about. As it happens, the

liberties taken by the narrator are incompatible with the discourse he has chosen.

(74)

The narrator chooses to write in a discourse incompatible with the historical time, and yet

Fowles’s representation is more accurate of the historical time. Fowles highlights this disjointedness between the historical truth and the historical representation by using the time-gap between the nineteenth-century Victorians and readers.

In the novel, Fowles exposes a great lie that history tells about the Victorian age. The novel’s readers, who have even a minimal understanding of the Victorian age, should know some major aspects about the Victorian time period. Critic Grzegorz Maziarczyk articulates in his article, “The Limits of the Narratee’s Interpretive Competence: An Analysis of Direct Address to 30 the Reader in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s

Woman,” a relationship between the narrator and the narratees, in which the narrator “assumes that he and the readers belong to the same interpretive community and share the knowledge of the Victorian fiction, necessary for a complete comprehension of his artistic project” (90).

Though Maziarczyk uses the term “narratee” and most scholarship refers to “readers,” the assertion is that the narrator assumes readers, or Maziarczyk’s “narratee,” possess a modicum of knowledge regarding the Victorians; thus, readers should understand why Chapter 35, labeled a

“digression” by the narrator (216), is jarring because Chapter 35 in Fowles’s novel could never have existed in a conventional Victorian novel. The digression is about the sexual repression during the Victorian age; however, the chapter also highlights the tension between sex and reporting on sex. Richard D. Altick, author of Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the

Modern Reader of Victorian Literature, proclaims that the “legend” of Victorian prudery is the most “known” though erroneous concept associated with the Victorians.

Tarbox considers the misunderstanding by the twentieth-century reader about sex in the nineteenth century as attractive fodder for Fowles to use in his novel (79). And in his “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” Fowles opines that the “respectable” Victorian literature “failed miserably” to show “a man and a woman described together in bed” (17). Although the general understanding of the Victorians associates the age with a great amount of prudery, the reality of

Victorian life for the greater multitude in rural England reveals quite the opposite. The narrator explains that Victorian rural England accepted “tasting before you buy” as a common practice. In other words, premarital sex, contrary to the prudish ethos of the middle class, was prevalent. As the epigraph to this chapter, the narrator cites the Children’s Employment Commission Report of

1867 in which young boys and girls were exposed to sex with regularity: 31

At the infirmary many girls of 14 years of age, and even girls of 13, up to 17 years

of age, have been brought in pregnant to be confined here. The girls have

acknowledged that their ruin has taken place . . . in going or returning from their

(agricultural) work. Girls and boys of this age go five, six, or seven miles to work,

walking in droves along the roads and by-lanes. I have myself witnessed gross

indecencies between boys and girls of 14 to 16 years of age. I saw once a young

girl insulted by some five or six boys on the roadside. Other older persons were

about 20 or 30 yards off, but they took no notice. The girl was calling out, which

caused me to stop. I have also seen boys bathing in the brooks, and girls between

13 and 19 looking on from the bank. (211)

Despite evidence of a highly sexed society, at least in the majority populous class, the Victorian prudery and sexual repression became iconic for the time period.

Bowderlization of literature contributed to the misguided belief that Victorian prudery represented the majority Victorian populous. The strength of the Evangelical revival accounts for much of the prudery in the Victorian frame of mind from 1830 to 1870 (Altick 193). Despite the reputation of the age for prudery as a major social custom, historical records indicate numerous sexual transgressions. Walter E. Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 records that “in a single year (1851) 42,000 illegitimate children were born in England and Wales” and prostitution became so prominent through the middle of the nineteenth century, the practice was called: “The Great Social Evil” (366).

Despite this certainty of a highly sexed society, or maybe because of the highly sexed society, publishing companies’ editors practiced a ferocious bowdlerization, a form of editing prudery for any reference that might offend an innocent mind. The term derived from Reverend 32

Thomas Bowdler’s efforts to create the literature Family Shakespeare in which Bowdler’s sensitive moral ethos expunged possible references to sexual indelicacies (Altick 195). For instance, magazine editors often censored Thomas Hardy, one of the authors Fowles references in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Hardy’s character Angel Clare pushed a milkmaid in a wheelbarrow, instead of carrying her in his arms across a stream. After a bishop denounced

Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the publishing company pulled the book from circulation, and Hardy ended his career as a novelist because he decided that he no longer would write novels (Altick

197). Hardy could not write about sex, but Fowles could and did.

However, as The French Lieutenant’s Woman is dressed in Victorian garb, it is especially perplexing to read the novel as if the Victorian novel is stripping off its gown. Fowles’s inclusion of sexual indelicacies fails the Victorian “litmus test” used by editors and publishers based on the model of the “‘Young Person,’ Georgiana Podsnap, whose parents were obsessively concerned lest any remotely disturbing suggestion or indelicate word imperil her innocence” (Altick 193).

The novel’s young Charles engages in sexual transgressions while abroad. He mentions wanting to have his fiancé in his bed. Later in the novel, Charles makes love to Sarah. In ninety seconds he will stride across the room, find the bedroom, walk back across the room to Sarah, carry her into the bedroom, run out of the bedroom to undress, return to claim Sarah, and then call her name as the sex act climaxes (274-75). Sardonically, Fowles seems to include enough sex in the novel to make up for the censorship enacted upon Hardy’s works.

Fowles inclusion of sex in a novel that appears to be a Victorian novel is imaginative because Fowles admits the scene between Sarah and Charles is not based on historical documents: 33

We do not know how they made love, what they said to each other in their most

intimate moments, what they felt then.

Writing, as I have been today, about two Victorians making love—with no

guides except my imagination and vague deductions from the spirit of the age and

so on—is really science fiction. (“Notes” 17)

Through commentary and epigraphs, the narrator reveals the falsehood of the Victorian legend, but in doing so readers recognize that the sex in the novel cannot have been in a respectable

Victorian novel. This novel, so convincing as a Victorian novel, cannot be a Victorian novel.

Fowles undermines one of the most erroneous beliefs regarding Victorian prudery through his use of both fact, such as the Children’s Employment Commission Report of 1867, and imagination, such as the bedroom scene between Charles and Sarah. Fowles uses the Victorian historical discourse but then subverts its discourse’s misrepresented prudery.

Fowles highlights a problem of how history is represented and comes to be known. The prudery of the Victorian time period, as expressed by a middle-class ethos, has been allowed to speak for an entire society throughout history. Fowles reconstructs that aspect of history in a way that only a novel outside of the time period could.

Uncomfortable Accusations: Mistaken Progression and Universals

Hutcheon suggests that Fowles’s novel prevents readers from assuming progress due to mere chronological time: “The narrator certainly makes readers aware of the temporal telescoping, but he is not telling him that change is improvement or even that he is so very different from the Victorians” (Narcissistic 60). Tarbox makes a similar argument, attributing the

Victorian nature of the book, as not historically Victorian, but, Victorian content as a means to 34 highlight the theme of time: “To understand the considerable Victorian machinery Fowles has brought to the book, it is necessary to look at the theme of time itself. Underlying the seeming denunciation of Victorianism is Fowles’s belief that many of its faults are shared by our age, and furthermore, by all ages” (78). Both Hutcheon and Tarbox point to the idea that historical time, not just the Victorian age, is important to the text and that both ages—all ages—share faults.

Successiveness to a later date does not guarantee progress; rather, successiveness is a matter of mere chronology. Chronology and successiveness should not be confused with progress, and

Fowles’s narrator makes this point by illustrating universal situations that both the nineteenth century and twentieth century possess.

Indeed, Fowles’s novel considers more than just Victorian history; it also considers the reader’s relationships to the text (historical reading) and the readers’ own time of reading

(contemporary time of the narrator). As Charles strolls along the beach to Ware Cleeves, the narrator comments:

He would have made you smile, for he was carefully equipped for his role. He

wore stout nailed boots and canvas gaiters that rose to encase Norfolk breeches of

heavy flannel. There was a tight and absurdly long coat to match; a canvas

wideawake hat of an indeterminate beige; a massive ashplant, which he bought on

his way from the Cobb; and a voluminous rucksack, from which you might have

shaken out an already heavy array of hammers, wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes,

adzes and heaven knows what else. Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than

the methodicality of the Victorians. (43)

Despite a plethora of details which suggest that mocking Charles’s equipage is warranted, the narrator chides readers for being derisive. The narrator contends that mocking Charles’s 35 preparations ridicules an important aspect of the Victorian’s seriousness in their fervor for discovery. The narrator questions readers: “We think (unless we live in a research laboratory) that we have nothing to discover, and the only things of the utmost importance to us concern the present of man. So much the better for us? Perhaps” (44). Experiences such as these disorient readers. The narrator coyly suggests that the “we” readers make mocking judgments on Charles’s

Victorian enthusiasm for discovery; and then, the narrator suggests that the “we” readers are not superior to Charles and his age.

Fowles’s narrator continues to challenge readers’ implied inferences of superiority to the nineteenth century by their virtue of mere successiveness. In another instance, the narrator denies readers’ sexual enlightenment over the Victorians. Tarbox argues: “Fowles examines sex at length in this novel because it is on this subject that we are most likely to fault the Victorians’ inhibitions and laud our own enlightenment” (79). The narrator denies the enlightenment of readers; instead, he argues that sex is a human constant, though the attitudes towards sex change:

I have seen the Naughty Nineties represented as a reaction to many decades of

abstinence; I believe it was merely the publication of what had hitherto been

private, and I suspect we are in reality dealing with a human constant; the

difference is a vocabulary, a degree of metaphor.

The Victorians chose to be serious about something we treat rather lightly, and

the way they expressed their seriousness was not to talk openly about sex, just as

part of our way is the very reverse. But these “ways” of being serious are mere

conventions. The fact behind them remains constant. (212-13)

In this chapter, the narrator is not denouncing sex. Instead he describes the shared passion when

“Charles’s and Sarah’s lips touched” (213). He describes sex as capable of providing pleasure. In 36 a sense, he even argues that the Victorians may have felt more pleasure, if pleasure could be measured, because the “Naughty Nineties” “in destroying so much of the mystery, the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden, destroyed a great deal of the pleasure” (214). The narrator implies the

Victorian attitude towards sex may be superior to the twentieth-century’s attitude towards sex.

This suggestion is contradictory to the implied inference of the readers’ belief that they are more sexually enlightened than the Victorians. Fowles’s narrator falsifies the “enlightenment” of any future century’s attitude towards sex, and makes readers aware that they are included in this universal human constant, sex.

To speak of sex is not to speak of sexual transgressions. Sex and pornography, as shown in the novel, are not the same. The sex between Sarah and Charles is not the same as the sex almost enacted between the prostitute Sarah and Charles. Tarbox’s interpretation of the sameness of the sex as presented in the above “Naughty Nineties” passage and the pornography of Chapter

39 points to the timelessness of both sex and sexual transgressions; but she incorrectly interprets the “timelessness of the whores’ dance” as the same act of Charles and Sarah’s kiss (79). Instead,

Palmer separates the two moments, and Palmer identifies separateness between sex and sexual transgressions.

Palmer considers Chapter 39 as a portrayal of sexual transgressions; in other words,

Chapter 39 exhibits pornography. He describes pornography as a perversion of humanity:

“Pornography is the most antiexistential type of writing or photography because it consistently presents a dehumanized world. The pornographer turns women into objects devoid of individual personality. People are reduced to animals only capable of heeding the rutting instinct” (40).

Like Palmer, the narrator presents the sexual transgressions in Chapter 39 differently than the kiss between Charles and Sarah. The epigraph to Chapter 39 points to both the paradox of the 37

Victorian society, that sex and “The Great Social Evil” existed in a society known for sexual repression; the epigraph also illustrates that prostitution remains an unchanged, universal fault.

Supposedly written by a prostitute, the epigraph reads:

Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have I

received any favors at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer in society,

are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass? Am

I not its legitimate child; no bastard, Sir?

From a letter in The Times (February 24th, 1858) (235)

Fowles’s preoccupation with sexual transgression in the novel foregrounds an uncomfortable accusation that neither the Victorians, nor the readers’ society, have overcome “The Great Social

Evil” which the prostitute in the epigraph discusses. In Chapter 39, Charles goes to his English gentlemen’s club after leaving Mr. Freeman’s house in Chapter 38. Charles feels trapped and frozen by the prospect of marrying Ernestina, being her financial dependent, and engaging in the trade world as an indebted idler reliant on Mr. Freeman. In his despair he enters the gentlemen’s club, sits with men of questionable ilk that he normally avoids, begins to drink copious amounts of milk punch, champagne, and port, and then he heads to Ma Terpsichore’s brothel. In the carriage on the way to the brothel, Charles envisions Sarah’s face and he thinks he sees his problem: “he needed a woman, he needed intercourse. He needed a last debauch, as he sometimes needed a purge” (238). As the carriage takes them to the brothel, the narrator describes a lascivious wink among the three men, Charles, Sir Tom, and Nathaniel. Inside the brothel, the curtains are embroidered with gold satyrs and nymphs in a “copulatory theme,” and a woman dressed in petticoats serves champagne (239). The narrator explains the universality of the “copulatory theme”: 38

Such scenes as that which followed have probably changed less in the course of

history than those of any other human activity, what was done before Charles that

night was done in the same way before Heliogabulus—and no doubt before

Agamemnon as well; and is done today in countless Soho dives. (239-40)

The narrator continues his argument that sexual transgression is universal by including an extensive excerpt from a 1749 book, The History of the Human Heart, in which ladies strip naked in front of men and proceed to act out wantonly, contorting their bodies into sexual positions (240-41). The excerpt ends and readers return to the Victorian period in which men lecherously watch the prostitutes and bid on them. Charles sees despair in the prostitutes; he sees the youthful prostitute who has not yet “hardened” to prostitution. The comparison of the hardened prostitute is similar to the way Charles felt at the beginning of this night—trapped and frozen. So it is through Charles’s reactions, sympathy and disgust at his arousal, that readers are led to view the scene. Similar to Palmer’s concept, Charles is described as an animal for being sexually aroused, despite also being revolted.

Charles leaves the brothel, but sees a prostitute who resembles Sarah and hires her.

Again, his actions influence the readers. In Chapter 40, Charles intends to have sex with her; she represents the pornographic object. However, she becomes less an object through a number of factors. She resembles Sarah, and her existence reminds Charles of the fate Sarah said would be hers if she left Lyme Regis. She becomes more humanized when Charles learns she is a mother.

Finally, when the prostitute says her name is “Sarah,” Charles becomes nauseous, in part because he drank too much alcohol. But it is also implied that her name affects him, he becomes sick, and he cannot have sex with her. He cannot make a pornographic act on a humanized subject.

Fowles’s work differentiates between sex and sexual transgressions; though, in neither category 39 can readers extol their progress. The narrator denies that sexual transgressions are specific to the

Victorians. Rather, from Agamemnon’s time to the readers’ time of London dives in Soho, and the implied time of all ages, the narrator reminds readers of the uncomfortable truth that some human universals, such as sexual transgressions, are flaws shared across the ages. Moving from the past to a present is no guarantee of progress, though readers might feel uncomfortable with this assertion.

Fossils: Petrified Time

Fowles dislikes the fossilized form of his novels: “I loathe the day a manuscript is sent to the publisher, because on that day the people one has loved die; they become what they are— petrified, fossil organisms for others to study and collect” (“Notes” 25). To Fowles, the published novel signifies the death of the writing, nothing can be changed, and the novel becomes a fossil. In the novel, Fowles also uses the fossils to represent a sterile, unchanging state. The narrator explains that Lyme Regis is considered a “Mecca for the British paleontologist” (42). Lyme Regis is a coastline of blue lias known for its numerous fossils (42).

Charles studies and collects fossils—albeit his is a lazy study. Charles considers the strata of rock as:

immensely reassuring orderliness in existence. He might perhaps have seen a very

contemporary social symbolism in the way these gray-blue ledges were

crumbling; but what he did not see was a kind of edificiality of time, in which

inexorable laws . . . . very conveniently arranged themselves for the survival of

the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson, this fine spring day, alone,

eager and inquiring, understanding, accepting, noting and grateful. What was 40

lacking, of course, was the corollary of the collapse of the ladder of nature; that if

new species can come into being, old species very often have to make way for

them. Personal extinction Charles was aware of—no Victorian could not be. But

general extinction was as absent a concept from his mind that day as the smallest

cloud from the sky above him; and even though, when he finally resumed his

stockings and gaiters and boots, he soon held a very concrete example of it in his

hand. (italics in orig. 45)

Charles viewed the rock as an arranged edifice, symbolic of Herbert Spencer’s theory of survival of the fittest. The narrator suggests that in this rock, Charles could have seen, but did not see, the symbolic crumbling of the Victorian social structure, in which Charles’s gentry class would become fossilized and extinct. As a gentleman in the endangered class, the end of Charles’s potentiality is often described as fossilized.

The second time Charles sees Sarah, she is sleeping: “The sleeper’s face was turned away from him, her right arm thrown back, bent in a childlike way. A scattered handful of anemones lay on the grass around it. There was something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she lay” (61). Despite the fossils of anemones that lay next to her head, Charles disregards them and stares at her, transfixed as she lay in the wild place (62). Here the description, which includes the anemones, is a subtle reference that places Sarah and fossils in the same image. The juxtaposition of Sarah and fossils becomes stronger throughout the novel. During another meeting she hands him two Micraster tests (italics in orig. 113-114), which are also known as echinoderm, petrified sea urchin, or sand dollars (Fowles, French Lieutenant’s 42). Though

Charles stayed a distance away from Sarah, he came closer to examine her tests. She offers them to him, and despite the excellent condition of the fossils, he instead focuses on touching her: 41

“She wore no gloves, and their fingers touched. He examined the two tests; but he thought only of the touch of those cold fingers” (114). At the end of this meeting, Sarah asks for an hour of his time to confess her story to him. He realizes then that the tests she claimed to have found in one hour were more than a simple gift; instead, he believes the gift of the tests are meant in part to persuade him to meet her again for that confession (119).

Tarbox and Huffaker both argue that Sarah is connected to the fossils; and they each support the concept presented that the fossils represent a form of petrification or extinction for

Charles. Huffaker argues that the novel shows Sarah in opposition to the fossils—an Edenic nature, wild, living present being juxtaposed to the dead fossils of the past. To Huffaker, Sarah’s offer of the fossil tests “represent a fossilized state which might await Charles” (110). Thus,

Sarah offers Charles evolution. The narrator explains early in the novel that tests Charles hunts for have important scientific value because they are “one of the first practical confirmations of the theory of evolution” (42). Huffaker even goes so far to argue: “Evolutionists regard the sea urchins as man’s remote ancestors—one particular parallel which Fowles says he intended. And it is by studying echinoderms that scientists have advanced their knowledge of fertilization as well as of genetic mutation—evolution’s biological process” (110). Sarah offers him the tests and she offers him an opportunity to evolve through his sexuality. Her sexual nature promises him a biological advancement, a way to avoid fossilization (110).

Tarbox also claims that Sarah intends to make Charles aware of his fossilized state: “She sees that Charles, caught in an evolutionary incident and metaphorically buried in a landslide, is becoming fossilized. She simply tries to show him the way out” (71). Much as Charles saw the tests as more than a gift, Tarbox sees the tests as more than a gift but as part of an opportunity to see life, to see his life in relation to the fossils. Tarbox argues that the fossils represent being 42 trapped and frozen—unable to change. Charles compares himself to a fossil in a moment of despair: “He kept saying to himself, I must do something, I must act. And a kind of anger at his weakness swept over him—a wild determination to make some gesture that would show he was more than an ammonite stranded in a drought, that he could strike out against the dark clouds that enveloped him” (167). This moment of despair follows his uncle’s announcement that he intends to marry a woman young enough to birth an heir to Winsyatt; Charles understands he is unlikely to receive the family title. His social status and financial status diminish, and he sees

Ernestina’s dour reaction to the news as evidence of her tradesman lineage. But his need to act results in a pseudo-act because he confesses to Dr. Grogan and defers to Dr. Grogan’s “orders and prescriptions” (182). However, he then ignores Dr. Grogan’s advice and goes to meet

Sarah—he completes a rebellious act.

But this act is not enough to escape Charles’s petrified feelings. After Charles leaves Mr.

Freeman’s house, and Mr. Freeman offers a trade position, the narrator describes Charles: “he felt the enormous apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian species. His step slowed at this image of a superseded monster. He actually stopped, poor living fossil . . . .”

(230). Charles must act again and again to keep from being immobile, and Chapter 44 illustrates

Charles’s fate if he does not continue to act. Chapter 44 provides one of the multiple endings for the novel. In this ending he marries Ernestina out of duty. Sarah remains the “symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys .

. . . There was no doubt. He was one of life’s victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil” (Fowles 262).

Here Charles stops acting on his potentiality and accepts the role dictated to him by his society. 43

However, Chapter 44 is only one ending, and an ending the narrator disregards as the “true” ending; rather, it is a plausible ending. This concept of endings will be addressed in the next chapter.

Throughout the novel, it becomes clear that fossils represent anti-Existentialism. Before

Charles rebels by pursuing Sarah into the wilderness after she leaves Mrs. Poulteney’s employment, he experiences an Existential epiphany:

The master went back into his room; and there entered his mind a brief image of

that ancient disaster he had found recorded in the blue lias and brought back to

Ernestina—the ammonites caught in some recession of water, a microcatastrophe

of ninety million years ago. In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw

that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection,

but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was

always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those

painted screens erected by man to shut out reality—history, religion, duty, social

position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies. (165)

Charles realizes that existence is always about the present, making choices in the present. In the novel, Tarbox sees Fowles’s definition of Existentialism as “choosing is in itself a meaningless act; one must choose his destiny again and again, day after day, to meet the real test” (76).

Charles’s epiphany reveals that he must act, again and again. He makes love to Sarah, ends his engagement with Ernestina, gives up collecting fossils, and sets off for America. Charles disengages with studying the past, the fossils of dead organisms; instead, he begins to make choices that show him moving towards the Existential attitude. Charles’s continued acts are 44 important to his process of becoming de-fossilized, to keep his potentiality and time from becoming petrified.

Dislocating and Disorienting: Narrative Time

In dramatic fashion the narrator at the end of Chapter 12 asks: “Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?” (80). The narrator in Chapter 13 answers with a jarring, “I do not know” (80). The narrative’s time stops. The plot up until this point is fairly traditional. Chapter

13 subverts the plot by becoming an intense meta-fictional commentary. Fowles employs what

Hutcheon terms “defamiliarization,” an element of Postmodern metafiction parody. Hutcheon describes defamiliarization as “the laying bare of literary devices in metafiction [which] brings to the reader’s attention those formal elements of which, through over-familiarization, he has become unaware” (Narcissistic 24). In Chapter 13 the narrator first questions a novelist’s role as a god who creates. The narrator argues that despite being a god that creates, he is not the same type of god as the Victorian novelists:

The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-

garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has

changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and

decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not

authority. (82)

The narrator exposes an over-familiarized novelistic expectation. He argues that if he has acted as if he knew his characters’ thoughts, he would be using the Victorian conventions that places the novelist next to God. In exposing that convention, he instead argues that his novel must be something else because he lives in the world with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes, both writers concerned with revoking the power of the novelist as a god. 45

The narrator continues to question over-familiarization of the often used concept of genre classification when in this chapter he suggests that perhaps he is not writing a novel at all but an autobiography, Charles’s biography whom he, the narrator, has disguised; or he is writing a book of essays. Readers must pause at these claims. The forward progress so often associated with linear narrative now becomes recursive. Readers must ask: could it be possible that the narrator is a disguised Charles? Which chapter would be the essay “On the Horizontality of Existence” or

“The Illusions of Progress”? The narrator dispels that idea that novelists have “fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen” (81). He also challenges the idea that characters are either real or imaginary. This chapter is debated by literary scholars as to its greater implications; however, what cannot be debated is that its inclusion stalls the narrative. The plot of Charles, Sarah,

Ernestina, Mrs. Poulteney, Sam, and Mary, halt in this chapter. Chapter 13 is a brief chapter, but a powerful chapter that works to disorient readers by defamiliarizing the traditional conventions of narrative time, while simultaneously questioning other over-familiarized concepts found in the traditional novel.

Fowles also dislocates time and what readers “know” with what readers “come to know” by organizing the narrative in a way that resists chronology. Salami best describes the movement of time in a Fowles novel:

in the classic realist text the discourses are arranged in a linear disposition. But

Fowles’s novels demonstrate no such linearity, and instead they offer a horizontal

movement generated by a multiplicity of texts. The main distinction between

horizontal and linear is the same as between synchronic and diachronic. As we

have seen in the classic realist novel, the diachronic or linear narrative is the form 46

that demonstrates the progress of events in a chronological order. But in the

synchronic or horizontal narrative, the movement of discourses is not historical or

vertical; it is circular, coextensive, and coterminous in a manner where texts

march together, collide, then rebound to advance again along the same front . . . .

The evocation of time as horizontal is thus an embodiment of the profound

subversion of diachronic narrative chronology. (22)

Thus, Salami describes the ways in which Fowles rejects chronological narrative. David H.

Walker in “Subversion of Narrative in the Work of Andre` Gide and John Fowles,” makes a similar point regarding Fowles’s experimentation with linear narrative. Fowles, who critics consider skilled in narrative writing, describes narrative as something dissatisfying. Walker astutely comments that Fowles’s dissatisfaction is that “The meaning of experience is not wholly perceived or generated in a progressive sequence, as the conventions of narrative encourage readers to think” (188). Walker makes a helpful observation for understanding Fowles’s subversion of linear narrative. By preventing readers from reading narrative in the traditional, linear chronology, Fowles highlights for readers the act of narration as opposed to the plot (188).

Walker surmises: “The ‘story’ is used as a pretext for examining ‘story-telling’” (189).

Scholarship recognizes Fowles’s refusal of easy temporal narratives. Alice Rayner, in

“Harold Pinter: Narrative and Presence,” compares Fowles’s technique of dislocating the reader with realist-dramatist, Harold Pinter. Pinter, she describes, “has a remarkable capacity to make his plays resist the dislocation of his plotting into a story. Yet, he maintains a sufficient number of the story’s features to invite such reformations” (483). Typical of Postmodernist writers, some conventional elements must be used for readers to recognize; however, the Postmodernist then subverts that convention. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles presents a narrative plot, 47 at first it seems so conventional that critics have debated if it is a historical novel. Yet, the often intrusive commentaries by the narrator (Salami 22) and the plot that resists chronological narration subvert the linear narrative form.

Understanding Sarah is problematic in part because of how “coming to know” Sarah is a disjointed and recursive journey. The novel’s title declares the novel is about the French

Lieutenant’s Woman. Sarah is first presented as a solitary figure, described as “It” and compared to a figure from a myth (11). Ernestina dubs the figure “Tragedy” and then provides the euphemism “the French Lieutenant’s . . . Woman” (13). Sarah seems a sympathetic character.

Charles describes his first impression of her as her having a tragic face with “no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness” (14). Mr. Forsythe describes her as an educated governess who can obtain a letter of reference from the Talbot Family, who would rather keep Sarah Woodruff as their governess. However, Mr. Forsythe explains that

Sarah fell in love with an injured French lieutenant during the time he stayed at the Talbots recovering from an injury, and upon his recovery she followed him to Weymouth in hopes to marry him. The lieutenant left for France, promising to return for Miss Woodruff. Mr. Forsythe describes the lieutenant as a “heartless deceiver.” He then explains that Miss Woodruff is delusional and believes that the lieutenant will return for her. Finally, he imparts that though she suffers from melancholia, she is not insane (31-33).

Sarah’s actions seem to corroborate Mr. Forsythe’s story. She comes to stay with Mrs.

Poulteney and manages to curb Mrs. Poulteney’s more grievous actions. Dr. Grogan attends to

Sarah one day, and he insists that due to her melancholia she must be allowed daily fresh air.

With her meager freedom, Sarah often stares out to the sea, as she stared the day Charles first saw her. After a series of accidental meetings between Sarah and Charles, Sarah asks for 48

Charles’s help, to receive her confession. Prior to the confession, Dr. Grogan shares with Charles that Sarah is addicted to melancholia. Charles feels drawn to the wild aspect of Sarah, and he agrees to take her confession. She confesses that she gave herself to the French lieutenant, not out of love, but out of desperation and a kind of suicide of her person in order to attain freedom that, although it makes a person lonely, allows her to be inconsequential. Charles comes to doubt

Dr. Grogan’s diagnosis, and he becomes more involved with Sarah.

Fowles presents Sarah as a sympathetic character for whom Charles and readers can forgive her sexual transgression with the French Lieutenant. However, after Charles makes love to Sarah in Chapter 46, Charles and readers are forced to recreate and reform Sarah. Charles finds her blood on his shirt; she was a virgin. She was never the French Lieutenant’s Woman or

Whore. The title of the novel and the narration up until this point must be reconsidered. She fabricated her tragedy; she chooses it. She is no longer the same sympathetic character, and she is now possibly insane and a Tragedy. Whereas earlier in the novel readers doubt Dr. Grogan’s comparison between Sarah and the women presented in the document of the trial of Lieutenant

Emile de La Ronciére; now readers must reassess Sarah’s melancholy. Are her machinations but a different version of Marie de Morrell? Was Charles wrong when he declared that her face showed no artifice? But in that apartment at. Endicott Family Hotel, Sarah is so convincing with tears brimming in pained-love, as she articulates her fears that she might never see Charles again.

In that moment, readers may find it easier to doubt Charles’s depth of emotion for Sarah, but she appears genuine. Fowles’s character is ambiguous because the narrator narrates events in a way that resists clear linear form and resists reformations. So later in Chapter 60, Sarah’s love seems ingenuous because Charles learns Sarah knew about his search for her, yet she ignored his quest. 49

And Sarah remains obscure, even at the close of the novel. Fowles presents plausible plotting, and re-plotting, without definitive sequencing or signification.

Frederick Holmes and John Fowles in “History, Fiction, and the Dialogic Imagination:

John Fowles’s A Maggot” reiterate the idea that Fowles fills his work with choice, almost likening it to a mathematical function in which the plot variations cannot “add up to one uniform” (232). In the novel, Fowles may not ask his audience to solve arithmetic, but readers engage in sophisticated participation to reconfigure and justify temporal events and then to reassess what is significant. Fowles dislocates the timeline of the novel. He dislocates what readers “know” and then what readers “come to know”; thus, readers use a recursive approach to make sense of Sarah. Though she self-deprecates by referring to herself as the French

Lieutenant’s whore, and although her blood on Charles’s shirt redeems her as a virgin, she has already become a stained woman again. Readers rush to recreate a Sarah of their own understanding. If Sarah is a self-ostracized woman, how does that change her character? The act of reforming keeps the readers ever in the present, the state of action and creation.

Scholarship on Fowles often focuses on this novel’s narrative, temporal trickery that requires much work from engaged readers. For instance, Jane Lasarenko discusses, in “From

Invitation to Experience: A Narrative of (Dis)Engagement,” the disengagement of students in the reading process and heralds Fowles’s work as presenting the possibility of student re- engagement because the novelistic structure such as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman “extends an invitation for an aesthetic engagement with the novel” (90). Additionally, Salami argues that the text enacts a freedom for readers:

the entire narrative structure of the novel is itself an act of “freedom” from

illusion to all participants in fiction . . . . Just as Charles, earlier in the novel, 50

believes that Sarah has an “unforgettable” face and sees “no artifice there, no

hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask” (p. 13), the reader, similarly, believes in the

novel’s Victorian conventional style until chapter 13, where the narrator removes

his narratorial mask to confront him/her with a more complicated voice. Here the

narrator’s trickery and duplicity is aimed at freeing the reader from the narrative

illusion by actually providing him/her with further illusions. (133)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman frees the readers from expectations of the traditional, linear form that so often creates an illusion that narratives with their neat beginnings, middles, and ends represent life.

51

CHAPTER 4

NAÏVE NEEDS: CONCORDANCE AND ENDINGS

Fowles’s Re-Structuring: Fighting the Tyranny of the “End”

One of the most debated aspects of the novel is the multiple endings. This preoccupation is not surprising due to the importance of endings to fiction and its readers. Kermode suggests that fiction satisfies humans’ need and readers’ need to have endings concordant with beginnings and middles (5). Inherent in fictions is the impending end (6). As seen in Fowles’s novel, fictions can diverge from simple paradigms of chronological plot, and instead become more “open” fictions (6). In his text, Kermode attempts to make “sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives” (3), and his insights prove valuable for understanding Fowles’s endings. Kermode suggests “open” fiction is problematic for readers because readers, at least on the subconscious level, have a naïve expectation of fiction to produce “concordant structure, the end is in harmony with the beginning, the middle with beginning and end”; in other words, readers expect for the novel’s time to align and produce significance (7). The narrator suggests this as well in Chapter

13: “You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen” (81). The narrator does not mention “endings,” but he denies that a novelist plans concordance throughout the novel. This type of structural expectation, that the middles and ends are evident in the beginnings, derives from the Bible that starts with Genesis and ends with Apocalypse, and all in the middle concords (Kermode 6).

However, the Christian eschatology so dependent on concordance of the beginning, middle, and end, which Kermode labels “naïve” (142), cannot be the eschatology of the 52

Existentialist to whom the concepts of a past and the end are different; thus, the term “ends” for the Christian and the Existentialist cannot have the same meaning. However, Kermode argues that humans in life, and readers of fiction, still must have the provision of an end, though the concept of the end needs to adjust because times change. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Fowles’s narrator describes “fight fixing,” and in doing so he also references concordance in fiction:

Fiction usually pretends to conform to the reality: the writer puts the conflicting

wants in the ring and then describes the fight—but in fact fixes the fights . . . . (in

other words, in persuading us that they were not fixed) and by the kind of fighter

they fix in favor of: the good one, the tragic one, the evil one, the funny one, and

so on.

But the chief argument for fight-fixing is to show one’s readers what one thinks

of the world around one—whether one is a pessimist, an optimist, what you will.

(317)

If fiction conforms to reality, as the narrator claims, then novelists cannot fix the fight because to fix the fight shows concordance between beginning, middle, and end, and of course reality does not have this structure. The novelist’s “fight” shows readers a beginning, middle, and end that proves that all along the novelist formulated a plan to show what the novelist thinks about the world. And this act, to Fowles’s narrator, is the act of an omnipotent god, and this god’s look would be: “one of a distinctly mean and dubious (as the theoreticians of the nouveau roman have pointed out) moral quality” (317). Fowles’s narrator identifies himself, as a novelist, wearing that face of the omnipotent god because he is considering fixing the fight for Charles. However, the meta-narration about the novelist’s predicament already begins to undermine the novelist-as-god 53 mentality by questioning the god’s, novelist’s, actions. And Fowles’s narrator does more to address the predicament of unrealistic concordance:

So I continue to stare at Charles and see no reason this time for fixing the fight

upon which he is about to engage. That leaves me with two alternatives. I let the

fight proceed and take no more than a recording part of it; or I take both sides in

it. . . . I think I see a solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false. The only way I

can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That leaves me with

only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet whichever is the

second will seem, so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter, the final, the “real”

version.

I take my purse from the pocket of my frock coat, I extract a florin, I rest it on

my right thumbnail, I flick it, spinning, two feet into the air and catch it in my left

hand.

So be it. (318)

The narrator implies that by providing multiple endings, he will avoid showing the readers what he as the novelist thinks about the novel’s dilemma, the “chief argument for fight-fixing.” To be clear, readers cannot completely accept this disavowal of the narrator’s role because the narrator has also already conceded that writers can never fully disengage from the act of writing; the writer must write. However, the meta-narration about a novelist’s writing and the postulated act of disengaging from the writing, both serve to make readers more aware of the fiction about writing. Fowles’s novel, published in the 1960s, is evidence of Bob Dylan’s “Times They are a

Changin’” motto, and his multiple endings speak to a need for the patterns of beginning, middle, and end to change with the times. 54

Fowles’s novel challenges readers’ expectation of an “end” by supplying multiple “ends.”

Traditional scholarship identifies two or three endings; however, four endings should be considered. Regarding the three accepted endings, critics often create a distinction among the three endings, with Chapter 44 disparate from the more plausible endings in Chapters 60 and 61.

Chapter 55 is not considered an ending by scholars, though it should; reasons to consider Chapter

55 as an ending will be discussed later in this chapter. To understand how Kermode’s theory provides a new interpretation of Fowles’s endings, it is important to first outline the features in each ending.

The ending in Chapter 44 includes Charles’s marriage to Ernestina, and begins with an epigraph by A. H. Clough regarding duty:

Duty—that’s to say complying

With whate’er’s expected here . . .

With the form conforming duly,

Senseless what it meaneth truly . . .

‘Tis the stern and prompt suppressing,

As an obvious deadly sin,

All the questing and the guessing

Of the soul’s own soul within:

‘Tis the coward acquiescence

In a destiny’s behest . . .” (262)

Critics consider Chapter 44 a conventional Victorian ending, a closed ending in which Charles upholds Victorian duty. Also in this ending, in a matter of lines, the lives of the entire cast of characters is concluded—Charles, Sarah, Ernestina, Sir Robert, Mrs. Bella Tomkins and the two 55 heirs, Sam, Mary, Dr. Grogan, Aunt Tranter, and Mrs. Poulteney (who dies and is sent to live in a more “tropical abode”).

Though scholars fail to mention Chapter 55 for its inclusion as an ending, the ending is similar to the style presented in Chapter 44. In Chapter 55 the narrator boards the train, enters the same train car as Charles, and while staring at a sleeping Charles, he ruminates: “. . . what the devil am I going to do with you? I have already thought of ending Charles’s career here and now; of leaving him for eternity on his way to London. But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive ending . . .” (317). This chapter, heavy with meta-narration, postulates an ending for Charles, and is largely about the effects of endings on novels.

In Chapter 60 Charles arrives at the Rossetti house. He finds Sarah and speaks with her.

The ending that the narrator records in Chapter 60 is one in which Charles accuses Sarah of the gleeful ruin of his life. Just as he readies to storm from the house, she tells him there is a lady in the house who can explain Sarah’s real nature. A young woman brings the baby Lalange to

Charles, who is unaware that he fathered her. When Charles asks her why she did not seek him out, Sarah in her cryptic manner explains, “It had to be so” (360). Charles interprets her parable as God needed to orchestrate their reunion. Sarah and Charles embrace, and the dark haired chubby baby endearingly bangs her rag doll against Charles’s cheek (360). Chapter 60 ends; and this is one of the “endings” for the novel.

But the florin-flipping-narrator reappears and rewinds time. The ending for Chapter 61 begins with an exact recording of words expressed in Chapter 60. Charles says again: “No. It is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting it . . .

. ” (362). After this speech, the ending for Chapter 61 begins deviating from Chapter 60. Sarah 56 argues that she cannot be his wife because it would be selfish of her. He again accuses her of malicious injury and turns to leave. She stops him, places her hand on him, and he interprets her long look as the offer of an arrangement, friendship and something more intimate (364). As he leaves, he passes a woman holding a small child. The woman starts to speak but Charles’s face stops her. He leaves the house feeling manipulated and lost. Back at the Rossetti’s, Sarah looks down at a small child and a young woman in the yard. The narrator cannot access Sarah’s thoughts and posits that the child perhaps belongs to the young woman. He also cannot move close enough to Sarah to see if she is crying. The narrator reiterates his earlier concern that the chronology of the two endings would dictate to readers that the ending in Chapter 61 is tyrannical to the ending in Chapter 60; he again makes a plea that each ending is plausible: “But what you must not think is that this is a less plausible ending to their story” (365).

The narrator may want to avoid “fight fixing” but the critics are more than happy to battle out the “right” or “intended” ending. Critics often ignore the narrator’s pleas. Most critics argue

Chapter 61 is the “real” ending. Problematic in the debates between Chapters 60 and 61 is that most critics are content to disregard the endings in Chapters 44 and 55. An interpretation that only considers the two final chapters ignores that Fowles postulated four plausible endings to his novel. Though Scruggs commits the same error by only considering the final two chapters, his approach to the endings is helpful. To study the endings he suggests that readers look back from each ending. To form his argument he suggests: “Looking back from the first ending, we might argue that Sarah’s acceptance of Charles is the . . . . Victorian cliché or a combination of several

Victorian clichés: Fallen Woman redeemed by True Love or Woman finds True Self in marriage” (102). After considering the backwards progression from the ending in Chapter 60 into the novel, Scruggs returns to the ending in Chapter 61 and reconsiders the events in the novel in 57 light of the second ending: “From the vantage point of the second ending, we read backwards in another direction . . . Sarah is somewhere between being society’s pariah and being her own woman, and this latter a [sic] identity [being her own woman] she seems to achieve in the second ending” (108). Though Scruggs’s interpretive conclusions of Chapter 60 and 61 are debatable; and he excludes the endings in Chapter 44 and 55 in his interpretation, there is value in considering each of the four endings as they project backwards in the text. In other words, the text encourages readers to return to the novel four separate times to each of the endings in order to consider how each separate ending developed from the beginning and the middle portions of the novel. Fowles’s novel benefits from the force of four endings, as opposed to one ending.

Tarbox refers to Kermode to make a similar conclusion: “As Frank Kermode says, imagined endings give energy, while real endings take away energy” (84). Instead of endings that create finality, Fowles creates endings that continue to energize the readers’ processes.

In an interview, Fowles explained that he does not abide by the idea that all experimental writing that attempts a new writing style is “good.” Rather, Fowles argues for the need to employ the conventions of a novel as a means to “restructure traditional modes” (Tarbox 179). Kermode argues similarly when he remarks on avant-garde writing: “Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty”

(116). Fowles’s novel preoccupies itself with Kermode’s concept of the history of the novel: “the history of the novel is the history of forms rejected or modified, by parody, manifesto, neglect, as absurd. Nowhere else, perhaps, are we so conscious of the dissidence between inherited forms and our own reality” (130). It is fruitful to now return to Kermode’s work to consider a different way to approach the multiple endings that moves beyond the naïve expectations by readers who insist on an ending that creates a consonance to The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s beginning, 58 middle, and end. Kermode argues that good novels are those that undermine readers’ simplest expectations, an ending being one of the most basic tenets of a novel (24). And so, Fowles’s multiple endings corroborate Fowles’s expressed intent to “restructure traditional modes” and

Fowles’s takes on, arguably, the most necessary of novelistic conventions—the end.

Kermode argues, “We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the greatest charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naïve, as some apocalyptic sects still are, we do not ask that they progress towards that end precisely as we have been given to believe. In fact we should expect only the most trivial work to conform to pre-existent types”

(24). Critics liken Fowles to Barthes, Beckett, Pinter, Nabokov, and Robbe-Grillet, thus certainly his works are not of the trivial sort. He dissolves readers’ naiveties and progresses towards the end, more correctly the ends, of his novel in a new way. Though Fowles’s novel works to employ novelistic conventions, as opposed to creating an absolute schism from convention,

Fowles’s novel still resists those conventions. Kermode describes the writings of Robbe-Grillet:

It is always not doing things which we unreasonably assume novels out to do:

connect, diversify, explain, make concords, facilitate extrapolations. Certainly

there is no temporality, no successiveness. In Robbe-Grillet’s latest novel the

same character is murdered four times over . . . . This is certainly a shrewd blow

at paradigmatic expectations. (italics in orig. 21)

Citing influences of Sartre and Camus for Robbe-Grillet (Kermode 21), the idea of plurality is evident in Robbe-Grillet’s character murdered four times and Fowles’s four endings. Humans seek rules “for our cultural ends, to observe distinction between mere chronicity and times which are concordant and full” (Kermode 50). But these expectations are the expectations that novelists, who wish to keep the novel’s form changing with the times, in order to keep the novel 59 from becoming a fossil, must subvert. A balance must exist among expectations that allow for readers to recognize the familiar conventions and to understand how those conventions are being altered. Referring to time and endings, Kermode suggests that a major job of authors is to fight against a “time-bound reality” but to do so in a way that “retreat[s] from reality less perfunctorily than the authors of novelletes and detective stories” (51). Fowles’s inclusion of the four endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a retreat from the tyranny of an ending; instead naïve readers who expect the significance of the ending to assign signification to the events of the beginning and middle, are denied this ready-made meaning making. Four endings suggest four different interpretations for the beginning and middle of the novel. Even though the beginning and middle does not change, such is the power of an ending’s attempt to create concordance with the beginning, middle, and end.

Four Endings: Rewriting and Reinterpreting Beginning and Middle

Chapter 44 has received marginal attention from scholars, with most confirming that

Chapter 44 cannot be the end because the narrator says Charles only dreamed that ending. The narrator also points to a weakness in the ending by citing its abrupt nature:

If you noticed in those last two chapters an abruptness, a lack of consonance, a

betrayal of Charles’s deeper potentiality and a small matter of his being given a

life span of very nearly a century and a quarter; if you entertained a suspicion, not

uncommon in literature, that the writer’s breath has given out and he has rather

arbitrarily ended the race while he feels he’s still winning, then do not blame

me . . . . (266-67) 60

Chapter 44 is hasty and inconsistent to the story, and the narrator describes it as “not what happened” and “what he [Charles] spent the hours between London and Exeter imagining might happen” (339). The narrator gives readers an ending, but he also gives readers definite commentary about how to treat the ending. The narrator tells readers not to accept this ending.

However, readers cannot unread the passage. Readers read about the marriage and almost certainly had a reaction to the ending. Readers may have been elated that Charles honors his engagement to Ernestina, or frustrated that Charles denies his freedom by marrying Ernestina, or suspicious that the novel claims to “end” when approximately one hundred pages still needs to be read. Whether the “ending” is not the ultimate “ending” of the novel, its placement highlights a possibility of an ending and engages readers in considering what that possibility signifies in an interpretation of the novel. This ending signifies the triumph of Victorian duty. The interpretation this ending bestows on the beginning and middle suggests that Charles is tempted from his duty, but his marriage to Ernestina illustrates a Victorian triumph of the status quo. The narrator reflects on the ending by calling it a “thoroughly traditional ending” (266).

Scholarship, as previously discussed, overlooks the ending in Chapter 55; thus, it has received no attention. However, scholars fail to notice that Chapter 55 is similar in structure to

Chapter 44; an ending is written and rejected. Fowles, in another one of his novels, The Maggot, uses multiple endings as well. Holmes’s and Fowles’s discussion about The Maggot’s multiple endings resonates with The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s readers of Chapters 44 and 55:

“Although she repudiates the tale which she [character in The Maggot] had told Jones, her sworn testimony does not cancel or replace that first account in the reader’s consciousness but stands in addition to it” (232). No endings, in spite of their rejections, can be unwritten. Readers are given those endings to consider and they must remain in the novel and in the readers’ consciousness. 61

Thus by Chapter 55, the novel engages readers in two endings, even if the narrator and readers reject the endings. If Fowles’s narrator leaves Charles on the train, an interpretation for the beginning and middle is more problematic. First, the narrator acknowledges how un-Victorian such as ending is because Victorians expected conclusive endings. The ending in Chapter 55, a great disparity of the conventional Victorian ending, aligns to Robbe-Grillet’s style by eschewing any hint of a traditional ending. However, this ending abandons Fowles’s interest in restructuring form because the form is a complete schism from the Victorian discourse. If

Charles were to stay on the train, Sarah becomes a martyr who leaves Charles so that Charles can maintain his class as a gentleman and marry Ernestina. Her last words to Charles before she asks him to leave Endicott Family Hotel are: “Today I have thought of my own happiness. If we were to meet again I could think only of yours. There can be no happiness for you with me. You cannot marry me, Mr. Smithson” (279). Should the narrator leave Charles on the train, the implication echoes the narrator’s earlier description about Charles: “He had become, while still alive, as if dead” (285). Condemning Charles to ride the train eternally leaves him alive, but “as if dead” because he can no longer act. Existentialism denies a past, and a person can only exist in the present by continuous action; therefore, Charles’s existence on the train becomes nothingness.

Chapter 60 supplies the Victorian, improbable ending in which Lalange is conceived at the Endicott Family Hotel, by happenstance Mary sees Sarah enter the Rossetti’s house, Charles knocks on the Rossetti’s door, and Sarah ends up in his arms. Huffaker argues that the addition of Lalange in Chapter 60 parodies the Victorian traditional ending. He argues that Lalange’s conception, in the brief and singular coupling between Sarah and Charles, is too similar to the

Victorian omniscient narrators who rely upon the “most improbable of coincidences” (Huffaker 62

107). He argues that to accept Chapter 60 would also necessitate acceptance of the version of

God that the narrator rejects—an authoritative and intervening God. The ending in Chapter 60 suggests the narrator rewards Charles for questioning society and rebelling against the Victorian class structure. This ending implies Sarah is happily married, traveling, and wealthy. This ending also shows the consistency of Sarah’s love for Charles. Her love seen in this chapter provides concordance of her feelings among the beginning, middle, and end:

At last she looked up at him. Her eyes were full of tears, and her look unbearably

naked. Such looks we have all once or twice in our lives received and shared; they

are those in which words melt, pasts dissolve, moments when we know, in the

resolution of profoundest need, that the rock of ages can never be anything else

but love, here, now, in these two hands’ joining, in this blind silence in which one

head comes to rest beneath the other; and which Charles, after a compressed

eternity, breaks, though the question is more breathed than spoken. (360)

The end of Chapter 60 shows Sarah’s love remains consistent in the beginning and middle of the novel.

Critics often argue for the ending in Chapter 61 by using similar logic to Palmer’s argument. Palmer argues for Chapter 61 because that ending indicates “movement rather than advancement” (104). Palmer argues that Fowles creates a circle with the narrative; Charles, at the end of the novel, looking over the Thames mimics Sarah, at the beginning of the novel, looking out towards the sea (104). Palmer contends that Chapter 61 illustrates the significance of isolation in pursuit of an Existentialist’s terrifying freedom (105). Instead of seeing Charles’s actions in the beginning and middle of the novel as actions that build towards a reward, which is what Chapter 60 allows Charles to do, Charles’s actions lose that climatic purpose. One action 63 does not move Charles vertically towards an evolution; rather, Charles must keep acting, horizontally and never towards “progress,” always in the present. The narrator denies momentum inherent in traditional endings that “wrap up” the plot. There is no momentum; Charles must just keep acting to avoid becoming a fossil. The beginning and middle lose their rising crisis, climax, and resolution.

Also, in great disparity from Chapter 60, the beginning and middle of Chapter 61 do not definitively show that Sarah loves Charles in the same way that she loves him in Chapter 60. In

Chapter 60 her love is more pure; again, she is akin to a martyr figure. However, in Chapter 61 her actions in the beginning and middle can still, arguably, be interpreted as love, but a lesser love. She may love him, but she loves herself more. The look Charles and Sarah share in this chapter shows her need for solitude, not love:

He looked down to her hand, and then up to the face again. Slowly, as if in

answer, her cheeks were suffused with red, and the smile drained from her eyes.

Her hand fell to her side. And they remained staring at each other as if their

clothes had suddenly dropped away and left them facing each other in nakedness;

but to him far less a sexual nakedness than a clinical one, one in which the hidden

cancer stood revealed in all its loathesome reality. He sought her eyes for some

evidence of her real intentions, and found only a spirit prepared to sacrifice

everything but itself—ready to surrender truth, feeling, perhaps even all womanly

modesty in order to save its own integrity. (364)

Sarah’s actions in the beginning and middle must be reinterpreted with this ending. Though the beginning and middle have not changed, this ending confers different significance to Sarah’s previous actions. 64

Palmer is very confident about his interpretation when he argues that the ending in

Chapter 61 is a “straightforward statement of situation and theme” (109). The theme he refers to is Existentialism, as he argues that the ending in Chapter 60 is anti-Existentialist (110). Palmer is not alone in arguing that the ending in Chapter 61 aligns better to the Existentialist theme in the novel. Similar to Palmer, the logic of these critics follows: a Victorian marriage, a patriarchal system of duty and responsibility, is avoided. Thus, Chapter 61 is thematically aligned, whereas

Chapter 60 is not. However, this logic is flawed.

The problem with reading Chapter 61 as the “correct” ending, because it better represents an Existentialist theme, is that the best understanding of an Existentialist theme is one that practices Existentialism. A simple explanation of one aspect of Existentialism is to say that it is a belief that finality is inauthentic and that individualism is paramount. Fowles does not need the ending in Chapter 61 to validate an Existentialist abjuring of systems and finality. Charles, who must be reborn to reconstruct himself, as is suggested by the Charles in Chapter 61, is thematically aligned to the novel; however, this ending is not the only way for the novel to exhibit Existentialism. Palmer argues for Chapter 61; his interpretation of the theme as represented in Chapter 61 has merit, but it is Palmer’s statement on choice that best aligns with the theme of the novel: “This ending is presented because Fowles does not want to deprive his mid-twentieth-century readers of their freedom of choice. In a novel based upon Existential premises and in an Existential world, people must be free to make inept choices as well as intelligent ones, and Fowles’s readers certainly can choose the penultimate ending if they wish”

(111). Palmer sounds facetious when he grants Fowles’s readers the right to be “inept,” but his statement is far truer than he may realize. 65

The presentation of four endings resists assigning signification to the novel, thus the resistance to finality in choosing an ending, is Existentialism in action. Scruggs explains that an exercise in total Existentialism is futile when he discusses that a writer is obliged to write, thus an Existentialist Fowles can never “escape the fate of being Fowles the poeta, the maker of others’ destinies” (97). Scruggs goes on to explain the relationship between the pragmatic and the Existentialist author: “it is one thing to condemn a ‘planned world’ as a ‘dead world,’ but it is quite another to abandon planning altogether” (97). Thus, Scruggs makes clear that Fowles must be an actual author for a novel to be created, but that author is not condemned to creating an inauthentic, authorial product, or, in other words—the anti-Existentialist novel. Readers do not have to accept one ending or any ending, as if Fowles takes an author-narrator role comparable to a dictator or god decreeing that all readers should accept the same ending, because accepting one ending ignores a major premise in the novel, the Existentialist denial of finality.

To deny finality is an invitation for readers’ engagement. Salami suggests that the ambiguity surrounding the multiple endings is a device of mystery:

that mystery will only remain mysterious if it is not organized in a certain

ordering process . . . . Thus, when there is no solution to the enigma, the reader’s

attention is shifted towards the actual process of the enigma and its presentation in

fiction. When the reader is not offered a solution to the mystery of any novel,

his/her attention begins to focus on how the mystery is produced. (29)

What Salami shows is that the lack of a solution at the end of the novel, the multiple instances in the novel when time was dislocated, the meta-narration, all combine to highlight the process of the reading experience, how the novel is produced, how meaning is produced; the plot, characters, and endings are an important part of the product but more for their ability to engage 66 readers. Fowles reveals in various interviews that he left Sarah ambiguous for a reason (Singh

195). He writes in “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”: “I get asked what I meant by this and by that. But what I wrote is what I meant. If it wasn’t clear in the book, it shouldn’t be clear now”

(25). The continued attempts to explain away the ambiguity in The French Lieutenant’s Woman suggests Fowles’s readers remain engaged in trying to make meaning of the novel.

The acknowledgement of the four endings as a device that produces four separate interpretations suggests the futility of trying to assign a “correct” ending to the novel. Kermode’s use of eschatology illustrates that the immanence of endings is inherently on the middle and the beginning. As such, the effect of the end is on every moment (25). Fowles’s use of four endings recognizes Kermode’s theory of the importance of endings. Fowles’s novel begins with the intertextuality of four texts, as each ending suggests different interpretations in light of the significance from each of the four endings; thus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman conceivably presents four texts. The novel invites readers not to choose an ending, rather, to accept the mitigation of expectations to be given an ending.

Fowles’s presentation of four endings best represents reality. Fowles explains that reality of life and writing is that life is about situations and their opposites:

Literary students know the text as a printed, immutable thing. It is very different

in the writing, when it is as much in the head as on the page. All situations are

haunted by their opposite, and all characters, the same. Only writers can know all

that their fictions might have been but are not, and the countless quarrels that lie

behind even the easiest, smoothest final text. (qtd. in Barnum 200)

Of daring disavowals of expectations, Kermode states: “the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality; and the more certainly we shall feel that the fiction under 67 consideration is one of those which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naïve expectations, is finding something out for us, something real” (18). Kermode’s statement about freeing readers for naïve expectations, finding “something real” echoes Fowles epigraph to his novel: “Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself”

Marx, Zur Judenfrage (1844). It seems possible that the multiple endings, considered in conjunction to each other, manage to converge and on this epigraph given at the beginning of the novel—it is readers who are emancipated from restrictions of the novel’s form and the tyranny of an ending.

68

CONCLUSION

TICK-TOCK

Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only when it is organized. It can be shown by experiment that subjects who listen to rhythmic structures such as tick-tock, repeated identically, “can reproduce the intervals within the structure accurately, but they cannot grasp spontaneously the interval between the rhythmic groups,” that is, between tock and tick, even when this remains constant . . . . The fact that we call the second of the two related sounds tock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure. The interval between the two sounds, between tick and tock is now charged with significant duration. --Kermode, The Sense of an Ending 45

Frank Kermode argues that the simple concept of tick-tock is a model for fiction. In fiction there is a plot, which he considers “an organization that humanizes time by giving it form” (45). Plot begins with tick and ends with tock. The time in the middle is inherently disorganized, except by fiction; writers humanize time and confer meaning upon it as it relates the beginning and the end, tick-tock. But stories are more complicated than tick-tock. Novelists have the job of plotting the middle in a way that overcomes simple chronology, a boring and unrealistic representation of time is spent in the middle. For the concept of middle, Kermode uses the word “kairos” to indicate a “significant season” (46). Fictions that give “chronos” are stories “passing time” between beginnings and ends. However, fictions that provide kairos reveal significance (Kermode 47). Time is a human need, and Kermode argues that “we may call books fictive models of the temporal world” (54). According to Kermode, time becomes more complicated as humans become more aware that time is a construct. As such, the time of an art- historian differs from that of a geologist, and these varying constructs require more of fictions if 69 fictions are to survive in a way that represents time of the world (63). Those times are changing, and so too must fictions.

John Fowles saw times changing in the Western world in the 1960s. As a writer whose works shows evidence of the Postmodernist, his works question time and history. The French

Lieutenant’s Woman shows evidence of a preoccupation with units of time and significance of time. The study of time, its constructs, cause disorientation when those constructs are subverted or removed, and this is much the topic of Fowles’s novel. He conflates and confuses the time- linking gap between the nineteenth and twentieth century. He uses history and his characters to create a supposed shared ontological space, thus blurring reality for readers. He looks at how history is an attempt by humanity to make sense of time, and his continual shifting between historical perspectives disorients. He exposes the unbounded nature of universal faults that periods throughout time continue to share. He illustrates the petrified time as a consequence for

Charles if he does not act the Existentialist. And, he creates narrative that dislocates readers.

He also answers Kermode’s call for a fiction that changes time. He lived in the world with Robbe-Grillet and as such he must have searched for a way to balance a mere succession of time with a representation of time that holds significance. Ironically, by removing the novel’s ending, by providing four endings, he makes the novel more significant for readers. He develops kairos between the tick and tock. He forces readers to reexamine their assumptions. He forces readers to reflect on their expectations of endings, and how those expectations of ends are really expectations of the novelist to confer meaning on the end, which to Fowles is an act of tyranny.

Fowles does for the time of fictions, for the novel, what artists like Brecht achieved in drama— engages readers to reexamine their assumptions (Johnson 302). Lasarenko laments that so often 70 theme erases the narrative experience (90), but in this novel the theme of time is, in part, what creates the narrative experience—and it is a jarring one for readers.

Kermode writes about another novelist, Iris Murdoch. He lauds her radical thinking about form but says that she has not yet written the radical text that she posits. She seeks to write a novel that has form but also avoids “deforming reality” (130). Murdoch claims: “Since reality is incomplete, art must not be too afraid of incompleteness” (qtd. in 130). If Kermode, lecturing in

1965 and publishing those lectures in 1966, had not yet found in Murdoch’s works the balance of form that is also unafraid of incompleteness, he certainly could have found in Fowles’s The

French Lieutenant’s Woman (written in 1967) a form unafraid of incompleteness, a success that celebrates storytelling, uses form, and abuses form to such an extent that Kermode’s formula, tick-tock, may need adjustment, tick-tock-tock-tock-tock. Fowles’s four endings allow for four different interpretations of the novel’s beginning and middle. It is both complete and incomplete.

The endings still confer meaning on the beginning and middle but in a way that is complicated with its plurality.

71

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